"My Fair Lady" on Broadway at Lincoln Center

Last week TD and I went up to Lincoln Center to the Vivian Beaumont Theater to see My Fair Lady and it was a big treat. It runs almost three hours and I enjoyed every minute of it. My Fair Lady stars Lauren Ambrose (below) as the transformed flower girl Eliza Doolittle, Harry Hadden-Paton from Downton Abbey as Professor Higgins, Diana Rigg, who I remember as Emma Peal on The Avengers tv show (!) as Professor Higgins' mother, and Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza's father. 

(photos from the Lincoln Center website)
Lauren Ambrose, best known from Six Feet Under, was famously cast to star in Funny Girl on Broadway but that production was canceled for lack of funding. Now she has her chance on Broadway and she is wonderful. She is of course a great actor plus she can sing too!
     The real revelation was Norbert Leo Butz who is a two-time Tony Award winner, but I had not seen him on stage before. He is magnetic and you can't take your eyes off of him. The rip-roaring number "Get Me to the Church on Time" (below) had people clapping in their seats and stopped the show with thunderous applause.

Mr. Harry Hadden-Paton as Professor Higgins was a no-show which was initially disappointing but we saw a tall and handsome understudy named Tony Roach who did a great job and thoroughly inhabited the role. This production is elegantly directly by Bartlett Sher. We saw his production of The Light in the Piazza, also at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and that too was a memorable play.
     My Fair Lady has the most wonderful set piece, which is Professor Higgins' Edwardian London house. On stage it dimly advances forward out of the darkness and lights up. Then it spins around to reveal different rooms - the library, the front hall, a bathroom or hall. Characters go through doors of the rooms as it spins and then it recedes back into the darkness at the end of a scene. It was beautiful how it was done, somehow evoking its own emotion.
     And of course there is the swelling Lerner & Loewe music thanks to a full orchestra playing away. It's one hit after another - "Wouldn't It be Loverly," "With a Little Bit of Luck," "The Rain in Spain," On the Street Where You Live."
    I was so happy to see this production because I have a long history with My Fair Lady. When I was young, the movie came out over Thanksgiving weekend, which is when my birthday falls so for my birthday I wanted to go see My Fair Lady. I was seven.
    We were visiting my grandparents in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and my mother and my grandmother and brother Thom and I took the "high speed" train into Philadelphia and saw the picture in a grand old theater that I'm sure is no longer there. I, of course, loved it all - directed by George Cukor, costume design and art direction by Cecil Beaton, and starring the stunning Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. The movie images have become iconic.
Eliza at Ascot –

Eliza at the Embassy Ball –

After seeing the movie we got the soundtrack record and I listened to it at home every day after school, oh yes I did.

When my family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, while I was in college, I was home working one summer and volunteered to do props for a production of My Fair Lady presented at the Fort Wayne Civic Theater. There were some cast parties and it was a fun way to make some friends, and after hearing the show every night I grew to know it by heart. For me My Fair Lady is a beautiful, lyrical Edwardian dream. What a long-lasting gift its creators gave.

Cecil Beaton in New York

The Marquesa de Casa Maury on a field of Beaton roses.

You may remember that I wrote in the October issue of Elle Decor magazine about the new "Cecil Beaton: The New York Years" exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York and its accompanying catalogue book published by Rizzoli. (Read the story here.) Last week TD and I headed up to the museum on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street for the opening night reception for the show. From the '20s through the '60s the imaginative, influential English photographer and designer often worked in New York City, and his photographs, paintings, set designs and costumer designs are on view in the exhibit. "With his European sensibility, Beaton helped make New York City a cultural center between the wars," curator and author Donald Albrecht told me.

We ran into friend Mario Buatta who helped sponsor the evening, and proceeded in. At the entrance of the exhibit are some stunning black and white photographs from the '20s mounted on a very dramatic black and white Cecil Beaton rose pattern wallpaper. We met at the reception Roger Bernard and Andrew Ginger from the Cecil Beaton Fabric Collection, who was over from England for business and for the opening. They reported that the Beaton Rose pattern is available in a number of color ways. I said I thought the big black and white pattern would look great in a small powder room. So luxe.
Here is a closer look at Paula Gellibrand, Marquesa de Casa Maury, photographed by Beaton in 1928. I love her shimmering dress and background. Her long oval face reminded me of my grandmother, Florence Mumford.

I admired this woman's similar shimmering dress...

and read the identifying card to learn that it is Beaton himself! In drag for a Cambridge University production. Those were the days.
Inside the exhibition was this delicate watercolor of Tallulah Bankhead from 1932. I like the colorblocked dress, which is a big trend in fashion this fall too.

Posted throughout were provocative quotes from Mr. Beaton:

The Englishman designed this costume for Birgit Nilsson for the 1961 Metropolitan Opera production of Turandot.

Perhaps Beaton is best known for his iconic, Edwardian black and white costumes for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. He had this to say:

Here is Cecil Beaton in top hat with Truman Capote. Can you imagine the conversations?

This is a photograph of Diana Vreeland that I had not seen before. The great editor pictured at home surrounded by her bibelot is charming.

One wall in the exhibition room was covered by a red version of the Beaton Rose wallpaper. Here it is over "The Art of Self-Promotion" which he was quite adept at.

And a final word from Cecil Beaton:

The show is at the Museum of the City of New York until February 20, 2012; admission is $10.